When posterity looks back at the children’s books of 2018, it will notice a strong political current that progresses in one direction.

When posterity looks back at the children’s books of 2018, it will notice a strong political current that, as in a river, progresses in one direction. Posterity will observe, for instance, that the presidential election of two years before continued to have a downstream effect in the form of numerous picture books that celebrate certain ways of seeing the world and offer a rebuke to others.

A popular theme for many picture books was immigration and the consequent importance of tolerance and kindness. Some books featured multiracial casts of earnest citizens pulling together; some showed children helping others of different ages and skin colors; some depicted cuddly animals dealing with questions of exclusion and acceptance. In general, the message to young children was bland and didactic: All are welcome, everyone belongs.

Photo:
Candlewick

Artists and writers sounded this theme as well, drawing on their personal experiences of adapting to American culture, though they did so with more beauty and eloquence: Yuyi Morales in “Dreamers” (
Neal Porter
Books); Junot Díaz in “Islandborn” (Dial), illustrated by
Leo Espinosa
; and
Juan Felipe Herrera
in “Imagine” (Candlewick), with pictures by
Lauren Castillo
(see below).

Yet, oddly, the idea of transcending origins also produced the year’s first big controversy, in the form of
Laura Moriarty
’s young-adult dystopia “American Heart” (HarperTeen). A story of political awakening inspired by the author’s disquiet with election-year immigration talk, the book would seem to check all the correct boxes: Bad American government interns Muslim citizens; good American teenager wises up and helps a fugitive escape through a prejudiced land to Canada. But it was savaged for the crime of having a “white savior narrative.” The online uproar was so intense that the influential journal Kirkus replaced its original review and retracted the star that it had given the book.

Other responses to the political moment that are, in the trade, called “timely” include
Jon Agee
’s “The Wall in the Middle of the Book” (Dial), which invited children to see the self-sabotaging foolishness of barrier-building;
Chelsea Clinton
’s issue-driven grab bag “Start Now! You Can Make a Difference” (Philomel); and
Airlie Anderson
’s “Neither” (Little, Brown), a picture book billed in its publicity materials as “the perfect tool for teaching children about acceptance.” In this last, the hybrid duck-rabbit main character admonishes two newcomers: “This is the land of All and everyone fits in here.”

But it’s not really true, you know. In picture books, not everyone fits in, and not all differences are accepted. In
Alex Beard
’s unsubtle political parable “The Lying King” (Greenleaf), a warthog gets driven from power and banished from society when the animals of the veldt decide that “a lying pig should not be the king.” And in a startling demonstration of what can happen in the real world to the heterodox, a picture-book collaboration between Vice President Pence’s wife and daughter—
Karen Pence
(illustrator) and
Charlotte Pence
(writer)—got a savage sandbagging. “Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President” (Regnery) presents an earnest view of high office from the vantage of a pet rabbit. The day before the book came out, TV personality
John Oliver
announced the publication of “A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo” (Chronicle), an amazingly unkind parody. In the story, written by
Jill Twiss
and illustrated by E.G. Keller, the Pences’ pet rabbit—now wearing a multicolored bow tie—falls in love with another male rabbit. The couple wants to marry, but the vice president, who is depicted in the book as a green stink bug, forbids it. Worse, he intones: “You. Are. Different. And different is bad.”

Well, as any child can tell you, only a bigot would say such a thing. No nostrum so thoroughly saturates today’s kidlit than the idea that being “different” is the best thing to be (provided that difference doesn’t extend to opinions). Lest any child have missed the message, though, Ms. Twiss rams it home by having one of Marlon Bundo’s friends explain: “Everyone is different. And different is not bad. Different is Special.”

It’s a cloying bit of writing, for sure, and it was matched in a larger way by the adulatory picture-book biographies created for heroes of an aging baby-boomer subset. These luminaries included the folk singer
Pete Seeger,
in “Listen” (Roaring Brook) by Leda Schubert, illustrated by Raúl Colón; the musicians Simon & Garfunkel, in “When Paul Met Artie” (Candlewick) by
G. Neri,
illustrated by David Litchfield; environmentalist Rachel Carson, in “Spring After Spring” (Roaring Brook) by Stephanie Roth Sisson; feminist
Gloria Steinem,
in “Gloria’s Voice” (Sterling) by
Aura Lewis
; gay activist Harvey Milk, in
Rob Sanders
’s “Pride” (Random House), illustrated by
Steven Salerno
; and two accounts of the life of musician Carlos Santana: “When Angels Sing” (Atheneum) by Michael Mahin, with art by
Jose Ramirez
; and “
Carlos Santana
” (Holt) by Gary Golio, illustrated by
Rudy Gutierrez.
Two much-admired Supreme Court justices also made the picture-book list in 2018:
Clarence Thomas
and
Antonin Scalia.

Kidding!

Of course not: This past year, any jurist hoping to be featured in an illustrated hagiography would have needed to be named
Ruth Bader Ginsberg
(the subject of five picture books since 2016) or
Sonia Sotomayor
(featured in three books for young readers in 2018). Indeed, books about girls and women—about their voices, their dreams, their achievements, their vision, grit, guts, ingenuity, defiance, STEM-suitability—continue to flood the market. There is no balance between the sexes on this one: I saw a single volume this year devoted to the psychological and physiological well-being of boys, Mayim Bialik’s “Boying Up: How to Be Brave, Bold and Brilliant” (Philomel), and even that was a follow-up to the author’s book for girls from 2017. Boys may come first in the world, though I doubt it; in exhortative feel-good books they barely figure at all.

The year ended with a manifesto for the toddler set: “Woke Baby” (Roaring Brook), illustrated by
Theodore Taylor III.
“Woke Baby, / you stop for no one,” writes
Mahogany L. Browne.
“You twist to your own beat, / you babble songs of freedom. / Like a good revolutionary, you never, ever sleep.”

Revolutionaries who never sleep: That was 2018 all over. Exhausting, really.